Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (23 page)

As her roommates woke up that morning, each noticed something strange. Lynda’s bike, which she used for transportation to the university, was still in the basement. They also found, to their surprise, that the side door leading to the basement was unlocked—this was unusual. They then hurried off to the university and spent the day going to their different classes, each assuming that one of the others saw Lynda during the day. When that evening they got home and found that Lynda’s family had arrived for a supper that she had planned, and that Lynda still had not appeared, they called the police.

The police began to carefully search Lynda’s room. When they pulled the bedspread back they discovered Lynda’s pillow soaked in blood and missing its case. Her horrified roommates told the police that the bed had been made differently from the way Lynda did it—she pulled the sheet over the pillow, whereas now the sheet was tucked under. In the back of her closet they found Lynda’s nightgown, the neck and shoulder area caked with blood. The clothing she had worn the night before—a pair of jeans, a blouse, and boots—were missing, as was her knapsack. The police surmised that somebody had entered the house, knocked Lynda unconscious, dressed her, made her bed, and carried her away. Not a single clue was left behind by her abductor—not one fingerprint, strand of hair, or witness sighting. Nothing.

Bundy was connected to Healy. Bundy’s cousin was a friend of Healy’s and Bundy was in three of Healy’s psychology classes at the University of Washington—but so were four hundred other students.

Back in San Francisco, Stephanie was beside herself with confusion and anger. It was now mid-February, nearly six weeks since she had last seen Ted, and he hadn’t phoned or written once. Finally she telephoned Ted in Seattle and when he answered the phone she berated him for not calling her. Bundy sounded drunk and dazed, she said. He didn’t say anything except, “Well, far out, you know.” And then he hung up on Stephanie. They would never speak to each other again.

On March 12, 1974, in Olympia, near the same place where Kathy Devine had vanished back in November, nineteen-year-old Donna Gail Manson disappeared. She lived on the campus of Evergreen State College, and around 7:00
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. she left her dormitory to attend a jazz concert being held on the campus. She never arrived. There were no witnesses, and no clues, and her body was never found.

On April 17, Susan Rancourt, who lived in a dormitory on the campus of Central Washington State College at Ellesburg, was planning to see a German film with some friends. She had a meeting with her instructors first, and told her friends she would meet them at the movie. Before leaving for the meeting, she loaded up a washing machine in one of the dorm’s laundry rooms. She planned to put the clothes in the dryer upon her return from the movie. After the meeting was over, she left in the direction toward the building where the film was being screened, carrying a binder full of papers. She never arrived at the movie, and her washing was found the next day in the laundry room, still wet. Police attempted to retrace her movements. Rancourt was a student of karate and would have fought back at any attempt to kidnap her. Police surmised that her papers would have been found scattered somewhere. The police found no traces of her movements.

For the next few days, police took reports of every strange or suspicious incident that students at the college could remember. There were many such reports, and among them were two reports of a young, handsome, neatly dressed man, with his left arm set in a cast and driving a bronze-colored Volkswagen bug. Twice he approached different female students in front of the college library, asking them to help him carry his books to his car. The first woman reported that as she approached his Volkswagen, she noticed that the front passenger seat was missing. For some reason that she could not explain, she felt suddenly afraid, and she placed the books on the hood of the car and hurried off feeling embarrassed by her “irrational” anxiety. It saved her life.

The other woman said that after she carried the books to the car, the man told her he had problems starting the vehicle. Would she mind getting behind the wheel and turning the ignition while he fiddled with the engine in the back of the Volkswagen? Again, something caused her to feel uneasy about getting into the man’s car, and she left, saying she was in a hurry and could not help him more.

These reports were among many, none of which really at the time offered any significant clue or meaning to Rancourt’s disappearance. They were filed away.

Ted made no mention to Liz of his engagement to Stephanie. Nor did he tell Liz that he was failing miserably in his classes and that he had already reapplied to the law school at the University of Utah, without informing them that he was attending school in Tacoma. Liz, however, could not help but notice how his lovemaking had changed. Ted now wanted to tie her up spread-eagled to the bed with her pantyhose. When she consented to this kinky sex play, she noticed that he went directly to the drawer where she kept her hose without asking her where to find it. The third time she agreed to be tied up, Bundy began choking her and she refused to be tied again. Then Ted started to demand anal sex; after trying it several times and not liking it, she refused that as well. Bundy sulked. Liz, meanwhile, was puzzled by this sudden shift in his sexuality—it was so much unlike him.

The next attack happened in Corvallis, Oregon, on May 6, about two hundred miles south of Seattle, at Oregon State University. Kathy Parks, age twenty-two, agreed to meet some friends for a late-night coffee at the Student Union Building, but she never arrived. Kathy stepped out of her campus dormitory at about 11:00
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. and vanished along the way. Nobody saw anything.

On June 1, Brenda Ball, twenty-two years old, who had graduated from Highline Community College two weeks earlier, vanished. She was an independent young woman who could take care of herself. That night she was drinking at the Flame Tavern, a seedy and rough bar just outside Seattle. At 2:00
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. when the bar closed, Brenda was in the parking lot trying to get a ride home. One of the musicians from the band talked to her briefly but was going in a different direction. That was the last time she was seen. Because Brenda was such a free spirit, nobody became worried when she was missing. It took seventeen days before her roommate was concerned enough to report her absence to the police. There were no clues or witnesses—just like the other women, Brenda vanished as into thin air.

Liz, meanwhile, was seeing Ted’s behavior get stranger and stranger. One night she woke up to find Ted secretly inspecting her body under the sheets with a flashlight—hauntingly similar to the recollections of Ted’s aunt when he was a small boy and she awoke to discover him placing knives under her sheets as she slept.

Although they kept separate apartments, Liz and Ted almost lived together. His things were often at her house, and they often drove each other’s cars. One day when looking for something in the closet, Liz stumbled upon a box of powder used to make medical casts, which Bundy had obviously stolen years ago when he was a driver for the medical equipment house. She also found a pair of crutches. On another day at Ted’s apartment, she accidentally came across a bag of women’s underwear. She was embarrassed by her find, and did not say anything to Ted. On yet another occasion, she discovered a heavy wrench carefully taped under the seat of Bundy’s Volkswagen.

On June 11 at the University of Washington, eighteen-year-old Georgann Hawkins disappeared. She lived in a sorority house on the campus and was visiting friends in various other houses on the campus complex. It was around midnight, but on the warm June night, the campus was full of students socializing outside. Friends escorted Georgann back to her house and saw her get within fifty feet of her door. Another friend leaned out the window of a nearby fraternity house and briefly spoke to Georgann. That was the last she was seen. Later the police investigation found a report of a young man on crutches with a broken leg asking several young women if they would help him carry some books to a Volkswagen parked nearby.

Shortly before he was executed, Bundy revealed what he had done to Georgann. He confessed that he had parked his Volkswagen in the shadows near some bushes by the fraternity houses. He laid a crowbar and some handcuffs on the ground near the rear of the car. Hobbling around on his crutches, he asked numerous women to help him carry his books to his car until Georgann agreed to do so. They chatted amiably as they made their way to the car. As Georgann approached the cute little “love bug” Volkswagen to deposit the books through the passenger door, Bundy scooped up the crowbar from the ground and knocked her unconscious from behind. He handcuffed her and dragged her into the Volkswagen, laying her on the floor in the space from which he had removed the passenger seat.

Bundy drove out into the countryside with the unconscious Georgann on the floor. At some point during the trip she regained consciousness and according to Bundy began to speak about a Spanish test she was supposedly taking the next day—she was obviously raving. Bundy drove out onto a dirt road, dragged her out of the car into a clearing, and struck her unconscious again with the crowbar. He then took a length of cord he kept in his car and strangled her to death. He dragged her body some thirty feet away from the car into a small grove of trees, and there he carefully undressed her. Fifteen years later, on the eve of his execution, he remembered undoing a pin that had kept her pants closed—a detail police had kept confidential. He then had sex with Georgann’s corpse until dawn.

In the morning Bundy drove away from the site, throwing out along the way various items of Georgann’s clothing and his killing tools. By the afternoon he realized that he had made a mistake. He returned to the murder site and, retracing his route, he recovered most of the items that he had thrown from his car. One thing perplexed Bundy: He could not find one of Georgann’s shoes. To his horror, Bundy realized that they might be back at the location where he kidnapped her. Fearing that police were searching the area and might have a description of a Volkwagen parked there last night, Bundy rode a bike back to the kidnap site. There he discovered Georgann’s other shoe and an earring that had come off when he struck her. He took away the remaining clues to Georgann’s fate before police could find them.

Three days later, Bundy returned to where he had left Georgann and had sex with her decomposing corpse one more time. Then he severed her head with a hacksaw and buried it in the ground about fifty feet away. Police never learned any of this until the last days prior to Bundy’s execution.

Ted Bundy had failed his first year of law school, but cleverly he decided to repeat the year at Salt Lake City, where he was admitted the year before. Without telling them he had attended school for a year in Tacoma, Bundy wrote that he had sufficiently recovered from his “car accident” and was ready to start. He was admitted into the first year and scheduled to start in September.

While Ted waited for school to begin in the autumn, he went to work that summer at the Department of Emergency Services (DES), whose function was to respond to disasters and coordinate search and rescue efforts. The summer of 1974 was the year that the OPEC oil embargo hit the United States, and the DES was responsible for allocating the dwindling fuel supplies in Washington State. Bundy was assigned to calculate a special project budget for the DES by the end of the summer.

Bundy’s arrival at the DES attracted a lot of attention. The women thought he was very attractive and the men were impressed with his political connections and knowledge of how to get things done with the state bureaucracy.

One former employee at the DES, Larry Diamond, remembered feeling jealous of Bundy and how everybody, including the males, was taken with him. While most men talked about women in the context of fantasy, Bundy did not. It was as if Bundy “compartmentalized” them, according to Diamond. Eventually Diamond concluded that perhaps Bundy had one major flaw: He was too perfect. Diamond explained, “Ted was almost one-dimensional if I think about it. It’s like there’s a very beautiful storefront that’s attractive and lures you in. But when you get inside to see the merchandise, it is sparse to say the least.”
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Larry Diamond’s perception was very acute and his metaphor of a beautiful storefront an apt one—except that it was not a scarcity of merchandise that waited behind the beautiful exterior, but horrific death. It is hard to say whether Diamond was more perceptive than others in the past, or whether Bundy, in the middle of his series of brutal rapes and homicides, was losing his grip on his carefully composed mask of sanity.

Bundy was about to get strange on his girlfriend, Liz. On the weekend of July 6 they went river rafting. They drank a few beers and were quietly drifting along the river enjoying the peaceful and sunny day. Suddenly Bundy lunged at Liz and pushed her under the water. When she came up shouting at him, he simply would not respond, which deeply unnerved her. He was becoming a total stranger to her. Later he said to her, “Can’t you take a joke?”

The following Saturday, Liz phoned Ted at his parents’ house in Tacoma and asked if he was free on Sunday. Ted told her he’d be busy. The next morning, July 14, as she was getting ready to go to church, Ted unexpectedly appeared at her house and wanted to know what she was going to be doing that day. She told him the name of a small park she was going to, hoping that he would join her there. He never showed up.

Fifteen miles east of Seattle lies Lake Sammamish State Park, a paradise of lakes, forests, rivers, and recreational facilities. It is a popular destination for picnickers, swimmers, and sunbathers. That weekend a local brewery was sponsoring a beer party at “Lake Sam,” as locals knew it. At the other end of the park was the annual Seattle Police Department picnic. There were some 40,000 visitors that day at Lake Sam.